LCANE Autumn 2025 - Seraina Nett

LCANE Autumn 2025 Seminar Series - Digital Humanities and the Ancient Middle East and Asia

6 October – Seraina Nett, ‘Feeding the Gods: Digital Approaches to the Administration of Regular Offerings in the Ur III Period’

Location: LG 11, Bentham House, UCL and online (you will recieve the Zoom link after registering on Eventbrite)

Feeding the Gods: Digital Approaches to the Administration of Regular Offerings in the Ur III Period

Seraina Nett (University of Copenhagen)

The thousands of administrative records from the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112–2004 BCE) give us a remarkably detailed view of how temples, officials, and institutions worked together to keep the state running. Among them, the documents that record regular offerings to the gods (sa₂-du₁₁, “delivery”) are especially interesting: they show how food, animals, and goods moved through a vast redistributive system, linking local temples to central agencies such as the livestock redistribution centre at Puzriš-Dagan.

In this talk, I explore what we can learn from this material by combining large text corpora with digital tools, especially Social Network Analysis. This approach makes it possible to trace the connections between individuals and institutions involved in the offerings, shedding light on both the practical logistics of feeding the gods and the social ties that underpinned the system.

By looking at these networks, we can begin to see not only how the Ur III administration organized religious life but also how people themselves—officials, families, and communities—were embedded in the structures that sustained the state and its deities.

See the full schedule: https://lcane.org.uk